"Sometimes sound summons the world with more certainty than my verse ...secretly, like twilight. The world seems lost in listening, trying to validate itself in each solitary sound." - Akio Suzuki
We have tried to invite Céleste Boursier-Mougenot already a long time ago and now we are very proud to announce our very first Displaced Sounds exhibition: From Here to Ear.
Please join us for the opening on Thursday the 9th of September 2010 at 19h00 at STUK in Leuven (Belgium).
In From Here to Ear 40 zebra finches go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from various electric guitars and cymbals. The birds create a captivating live soundscape, a unique symphonic and sensory experience.
Trained as a musician and composer, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. The artist puts certain laws and systems in motion which he then allows to exist and evolve autonomously, rather than merely using chaos and dissonance as compositional models.
9 Sept - 3 Oct 2010 opening hours: wed & thu 14h00 - 21h00, fri-sun 14h00 - 18h00, closed on Monday and Tuesday
on the 29th of March we have an amazing program at STUK in Leuven, the fifth evening in our series. with performances by Toshiya Tsunoda, Manu Holterbach & Michael Northam and Mieke Lambrigts.
Holterbach and Northam met on a crossing country skiing trip near Grenoble, France in 2001. Since this time they have continued a friendly dialogue that intertwined their mutual obsessions — collecting obscure music, researching sound-traditions from around the world, observing everyday natural phenomena and the application all of these explorations towards the creation of their own suspended music. After nearly ten years of exchange, they are meeting in the spring of 2010 to realize their first performances together. During these performances, both Holterbach and Northam take a ‘hands-on’ approach—creating a live, immediate music using only simple resonate objects, traditional instruments, pure tones, field recordings and basic processing. An approach that enables them to explore immediate surface tensions and fragile micro-tonal clusters in real time and in context of the live situation.
The performance will be an assemblage of their individual techniques—shifting easily between solos and duets. Holterbach’s delicate layering of lacework tonalities from guitar, oscillators and distant sounds one on top of the other quietly forming crystalline sonic structures. Northam’s ‘actionistic’ approach evoking animistic textures, breath and tones generated from flute and voice. A pendulum arching between two universes, bringing the listener through a kind of loom—weaving rich tapestries of sound.
Soundartist Mieke Lambrigts works with subtle manipulated recordings and sound-generators. The decoding and recycling of every day sounds form the starting-point for the manipulation and orchestration of recordings.
some performances at Artefact festival (9>14 Feb 2010):
Long String Instrument performance Ellen Fullman | Konrad Sprenger
Tuesday 9th of Feb 2010
Ellen Fullman’s work resides between the fields of sound art and music. Her primary activity has been the development of the Long String Instrument, in which her rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. At STUK the strings will be more than 18 metres long. Fullman will be joined by the incredible Konrad Sprenger to perform with her. Biba Kopf, in The Wire, wrote of the Long String Instrument: “Listening to it, you feel like you are inside some cyclopean subterranean grotto… its bejewelled walls glistening with an alien lustre (and) sounding like something that shimmers, iridescent shapes bend conventional pulse-based time and impose their own paradoxical temporality, where constant movement teems within a vast stasis.”
Entanglements for Four Projectors
Luis Recoder | Sandra Gibson | Ben Owen
Wednesday the 10th of Feb 2010
“Scratched film loops on opaque black leader emulsion provide the basic and base material(ism) for a projective and introjective encounter for four 16mm film projectors, two projectionists, and one projection “noise” engineer. The footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in dispersing and/or scattering the projected light itself. If the rotating shutter-blade which is lodged in the projector is meant not only to produce the palpitating illusion of movement but also to obstruct our access to how this cinematographic trick is achieved, the critical tendency would then be to impair the basic apparatus, to take it apart piece by piece. But there is another way! To further obstruct the obstruction. To shadow the shadow into thinking that it is being overshadowed, overcome, overperformed. Outperform. Imagine the shutter-blade efficiently rotating in its assembly, obliterating not only the light but the film itself. For it expresses the outburst of its violence not knowing that its vicious cycles lacerate into the soft and fragile emulsion of time.” – Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder
“As sound engineer, I follow two mono audio signals from two separate projectors. The marks and patterns being seen are as well being received into the software (ppooll) where subtle modulating filters are applied to the sound and then amplified into the space. The play between simply sending what is being received and subtle shifts through filters and/or synthesis follow in an improvisatory motion in parallel to the visual projections of light and smudge around the room. Through these systems the sound follows paths in oscillating flux, one that parallels directly the information being seen, one that contains suggested loops and one that is most important - is the degrading rhythms of the film makers marks. The hand of the sound engineer only occasionally guides the multiple layers of sound oscillating in and out of aural focus, these light holes determining the point of entry, the machines grace of precision, into some scope of mass exploration.” – Ben Owen
The Symbol of the Unconquered
William Hooker
Saturday the 13th of Feb 2010
The genre-bending free jazz drumming legend William Hooker has been exploring the adventurous borders of avant garde music with kindred spirits like David Murray, David Ware, Thurston Moore, Zeena Parkins, Elliot Sharp, Christian Marclay and many others.
In this performance he will improvise a live soundtrack to pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film classic The Symbol of the Unconquered, originally advertised as a chance to come see “the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan.” Some of Micheaux’s earliest and most significant films were responses to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), portraying the African-American struggle against white racism and the KKK.
Some of these films were lost for decades and restored in the 1990s. In Symbol of the Unconquered, the black hero holds his ground and protects a light-skinned mulatto neighbor (who is passing as white) as a local gang of thieves and hooded, torch-carrying Klansmen plots to frighten him, steal his land and finally, to kill him. Though how they do it remains unknown due to a key missing reel, the amorous “black” couple emerges from the ordeal unscathed and thrilled to discover their shared racial identity.
Some months ago Aernoudt Jacobs did a residency here at STUK working on his latest installation Permafrost, he also did a talk on the work at a previous Displaced Sounds evening. Last October he presented it for the first time at Vooruit’s Almost Cinema exhibition (where you could also experience the amazing ‘It’s in the Air‘ by Felix Hess). The final result was extremely beautiful. If you missed it in Ghent, you have another chance to see this quiet and mesmerizing work at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 24 till 27 november at their Burning Ice program.
Permafrost is an environmental sound sculpture about the freezing process of water. An installation has been developed in which we can observe the constantly repeated cycle of freezing and melting. By means of a custom-made sound apparatus the process is made audible. Permafrost deals with the sometimes paradoxical relation between nature and technique.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity.
The formation of ice (as a process) is a fascinating (sonic) experience. It allows the approach of matter transformation - liquid into solid - as a sonic process and to experience how in the end this inaudible process becomes perceivable to the audience. From a scientific point of view I want to research sound conductivity in changing matter - how the same sounds will change along with the consistency change of water. Ice, water and the different stages in between are an ideal platform for this research. Because of their physical qualities water and ice each have a different effect upon sound. This has to do with the speed of sound. The speed at which sound propagates itself through air is about 340m/s (i.e. If sound is produced 340m away it will be heard 1 second later). The speed of sound under water is of 1500m/s; 3 times faster than air. In ice this becomes about 3300m/s. This means that in ice sound reaches its destination 10 times faster than in air. Practically this also means that as matter changes the pitch of the sound will also change. The freezing process will thus produce sounds relating directly to the growth process of crystals.
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox.
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
A few weeks ago I saw a very good exhibition at HISK in Ghent. After All, Everything Is Different In The End is a group show that deals with the matter of sound and how listening is affected by a subjective notion of synchronicity. The selection of art works on show investigates listening as a simultaneous activity. Based on the simple fact that every listening situation coincides with other sonic or visual influences, the show largely explores a dialogue on the processes behind simultaneous levels of perception.
After All, Everything Is Different In The End is the second show of a trilogy in the framework of Sonic Thinking, a long-term curatorial research project on listening in the current art discourses. In an attempt to open up new spaces where critical positions and new perspectives on sound and listening can merge to enable a radical sonic thinking, the show leaves the boundaries of the unitary exhibition/listening space behind and explores unknown fields: things happen in distant places simultaneously, a radio station broadcasts the imagination of a radio broadcast, the audience is invited to submit invisible sculptures, one hundred people act as metronomes and sounds are teleported to spy out military grounds.
some good works from the exhibition:
Brandon LaBelle’s Concert is a video work presented on three monitors. The first video consists of finding people in spatial situations: sitting at a cafe table, waiting in line, walking through an open square, sitting in an open window, going up an escalator. The second and third videos act as translations of the first: LaBelle asked various people to listen to the sounds of the first video, without seeing the corresponding images, and attempt to describe what they are hearing - to tell us the scene, the location, the time and atmosphere. The final work is presented as a “trio”, with the first video in the center, bracketed by people’s responses. The only sound is that of the second and third videos, which replaces the original soundtrack in favor of people’s vocal descriptions. The work forms a play of place and its aural life by recasting the urban environment with personal portraits.
The militant sound collaborative Ultra-red present a site-specific installation Protocols For In Front, Behind And Beyond especially made for this exhibition. Two mono directional microphones are mounted on the outside of the windows facing the yard of the Leopoldskazerne, capturing the sound from the part of the building used for military intelligence and nursery training. All windows in the exhibition space are covered by walls, letting only a glowing crown of light pass through the gaps into the space. The sound the microphones capture from the outside is played back into the exhibition space on two speakers which are mounted to one of the walls covering the windows. Centered between the two speakers, a framed document instructs the visitor on how to interact with the acousmatic listening situation in front, behind and beyond the wall.
The Perfect Sound by Katarina Zdjelar is a single-channel video work which explores and investigates notions of producing the ‘perfect sound’ within the English spoken language. The fact that we each have a unique sound and voice whilst sharing the same vocal apparatus intrigues the artist who worked with the relatively recent phenomenon of ‘accent removal’ to extract the ‘foreignness’ within a subject’s accent. The video shows the subject repeating vocal exercises with a speech therapist which demonstrates the unique qualities of his accent that are the residual traces of his spoken heritage. The subsequent words take on an abstract and musical quality with their continued repetition rendering them meaningless, transforming the word into a sound. Uttering a word becomes like striking a note on the piano trying to perform a composition. Ultimately with the ‘Perfect Sound’ Zdjelar’s work asks where is an accent and investigates the notion of acoustic tolerance which is being tested between a speech therapist and his client.
The (quick) Time Machine by Nate Harrison is a re-presentation of the 1960 film adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The film was separated into every one of its ‘hard’ edits, which were then made into video loops. Each loop was subsequently sequenced according to the original storyline across a 40-block grid, read left to right, top to bottom. At any given moment the audio is in sync with one of the grid spaces, until that space starts looping, at which point the adjacent right block begins, with the audio syncing to it. When the grid fills up the process starts over in the top left corner. The video, through its structure of exactly 1000 edits over the length of the original film, ends in the bottom right hand corner.
Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.
>Why this song?
The song “Daisy Bell,” originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, was made famous in 1962 by John Kelly, Max Mathews, and Carol Lockbaum as the first example of musical speech synthesis. In contrast to the 1962 version, Bicycle Built For 2,000 was synthesized with a distributed system of human voices from all over the world.
>Did people know what they were submitting to?
Workers were asked to imitate what they heard. They were not given additional information.
>Isn’t that the song that HAL is singing at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Yes.
>How much were people paid to record their voice?
$0.06 USD
>Where are these people from?
People from 71 countries participated. The top ten were the United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, Macedonia, Philippines, Germany, Romania, Italy, and Pakistan.
>How did people record and submit their voice?
In a web browser, through a custom audio recording tool created in Processing.
“«Opera Calling» - is an artistic intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. By means of an unknown number of audio bugs placed within the auditorium of the local opera house, the outside public is given access to the performances on stage. The performances are retransmitted to the public not through broadcasting, but by telephoning each person individually.
From March 9th to May 26th 2007, audio bugs, hidden in the auditorium, transmitted the performances of the Zurich Opera to randomly selected telephone land-lines in the city of Zurich. Over 90 hours of opera performances were retransmitted to 4363 households.
In proper style of a home-delivery-service, anyone that picked up their telephone, was able to listen to the on-going opera performances for as long as s/he wanted through a live connection with the audio bug signal. As soon as the listener would hang up, the telephone machine would call the next random number.
With the use of the telephone for the dissemination of the opera transmissions a virtual auditory space is opened not as blanket coverage (as with broadcasting media) but as a home-delivery service: Every person is individually connected and can eaves-drop at their leisure from the comfort of their living room.
Following Bell’s original intention for the use of the telephone, «Opera Calling» makes use of the telephone as a broadcasting media. It revalues this long-forgotten application, revealing how the telephone in its beginings was just an apparatus uncoupled from specific social use. The Opera works as a symbol for a closed-circuit cultural operating system which is opened up by connecting it to the a telephone network. By re-distributing the performance-output, normally contained within the physical walls of the Opera House, Opera Calling also askes questions of cultural ownership.
The project received wide media attention mainly locally, but also internationally. Through this, «Opera Calling» gained a third level of access:
People who were randomly called by the telephone machine had sometimes seen the project on television news and - thrilled to have been chosen by the machine - would call other members of the household to the phone, explaining to them the project. In some cases people would sit in groups in front of the telephone, listening to the opera, discussing the transmission, just as people probably had done one hundred years ago with the “Telefon Hirmondo”.
The media also informed the Zurich Opera about the project, by asking for a statement regarding «Opera Calling». After denying any involvement with the project, they sent a letter to both Cabaret Voltaire and !Mediengruppe Bitnik with the order to remove all hidden bugs, immediatly stop the transmissions, and threatening to file a law-suit.
There followed a debate in the media over cultural ownership which resulted in a David vs. Goliath style discussion about the flow of cultural subsidies. Finally the Zurich Opera decided to tolerate «Opera Calling» as a temporary enhancement of their performance repertoire.”
“Sound in Context” is a new documentary that talks about the struggles and challenges that todays experimental sound musician and curator comes across.
It has interviews with Seth Cluett, Benedict Drew, Barry Esson (Arika), Anne Hilde Neset (The Wire), Hans Ulrich Obrist ( Serpentine Gallery), Mike Stubbs (FACT), David Toop, Richard Whitelaw (Sonic Arts Network)
On Monday 9 and Tuesday 10 you can see this new performance at STUK in the Playground Live Art Festival. Visual artists Ulla von Brandenburg, Laurent Montaron, Julien Discrit and Thomas Dupouy drew their inspiration from the phenomenon of synaesthesia. This neurological process automatically links one sense to another; in this case, somebody seeing colours when hearing music. In close cooperation with a synaesthesist, an intriguing soundscape on three traditional reed organs is translated live into a spectacle of colour planes and projections on stage.
“Scratched film loops on opaque black leader emulsion provide the basic and base material(ism) for a projective and introjective encounter for four 16mm film projectors, two projectionists, and one projection “noise” engineer. The footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in dispersing and/or scattering the projected light itself. If the rotating shutter-blade which is lodged in the projector is meant not only to produce the palpitating illusion of movement but also to obstruct our access to how this cinematographic trick is achieved, the critical tendency would then be to impair the basic apparatus, to take it apart piece by piece. But there is another way! To further obstruct the obstruction. To shadow the shadow into thinking that it is being overshadowed, overcome, overperformed. Outperform. Imagine the shutter-blade efficiently rotating in its assembly, obliterating not only the light but the film itself. For it expresses the outburst of its violence not knowing that its vicious cycles lacerate into the soft and fragile emulsion of time.” – Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder
“As sound engineer, I follow two mono audio signals from two separate projectors. The marks and patterns being seen are as well being received into the software (ppooll) where subtle modulating filters are applied to the sound and then amplified into the space. The play between simply sending what is being received and subtle shifts through filters and/or synthesis follow in an improvisatory motion in parallel to the visual projections of light and smudge around the room. Through these systems the sound follows paths in oscillating flux, one that parallels directly the information being seen, one that contains suggested loops and one that is most important - is the degrading rhythms of the film makers marks. The hand of the sound engineer only occasionally guides the multiple layers of sound oscillating in and out of aural focus, these light holes determining the point of entry, the machines grace of precision, into some scope of mass exploration.” – Ben Owen
The genre-bending free jazz drumming legend 
Some of these films were lost for decades and restored in the 1990s. In Symbol of the Unconquered, the black hero holds his ground and protects a light-skinned mulatto neighbor (who is passing as white) as a local gang of thieves and hooded, torch-carrying Klansmen plots to frighten him, steal his land and finally, to kill him. Though how they do it remains unknown due to a key missing reel, the amorous “black” couple emerges from the ordeal unscathed and thrilled to discover their shared racial identity.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity. 
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox. 
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
A few weeks ago I saw a very good exhibition at 
Brandon LaBelle
On Monday 9 and Tuesday 10 you can see this new performance at